A customer adds a product to the cart, moves on, and the cart comes up empty. Or, worse, it shows items they never picked. Both are the same problem seen from two sides: WooCommerce recognises each visitor by a small session cookie, and anything that stops that cookie arriving, or that serves one person's page to another, ruins the cart. The causes are few and you can test them in order.
Find out which side it is on
| 1 |
Repeat the problem in a private window, signed out and with no extensions. If the cart works there, the problem was in the customer's browser (blocked cookies, extensions that wipe data) and not in the shop.
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| 2 |
Check that the cart, checkout and account pages are excluded from the cache. This is the commonest cause. A cart page stored in the cache and served to everyone shows the cart of whoever asked first. Check the exclusions in your cache plugin; the rules are in cache rules for a WordPress site, and the server plugin is in LiteSpeed Cache: the first settings.
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| 3 |
Check that you use the same address from start to finish. A visitor who enters through www and pays at the address without it, or starts on http and ends on https, loses the cookie on the way. Pick one address and redirect the others to it (from http to https).
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| 4 |
Switch the plugins off, one at a time. Security plugins that delete cookies, optimisation plugins that merge scripts and page-cache plugins are the usual suspects. If the cart starts working, switch them back on until the culprit shows.
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| 5 |
Switch to a default theme for a moment. If the cart works, the problem is the theme, usually an old cart template.
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What each symptom usually says
| What you see |
Likeliest cause |
| The cart is empty when you change page |
The session does not stick: a blocked cookie, an address that flips between www and bare, or a security rule. |
| You see someone else's items |
The cart page is cached. Exclude cart, checkout and account. |
| The cart count in the menu does not update |
The background request that refreshes the cart is blocked or cached. |
| It only fails for some customers |
Browsers with cookies blocked, or privacy extensions. |
| It started after you switched something on |
It was the last plugin, theme or cache rule you touched. |
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A cached cart is a privacy failure, not only a sales one. If you ever saw items or addresses that were not yours, stop caching those pages at once and tell us.
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Always test with two windows: a normal one signed in and a private one signed out. They must behave differently and each must see only its own cart. If the problem is that it fails at the very end, the right page is checkout errors.
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Excluded the pages from the cache and the cart still fails? Tell us the address and the time of a test, and we will see what the server returns.
Open a support ticket
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